Philosophy

Vital factors

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No fact exists alone.  Every perceptible fact is the manifestation of a state of existence relative to the existence of other facts.  Thereby every fact is distinguishable by what it is and isn’t, including the ‘fact of existence’.  Then life is and is not a prominent feature of the way things are – because reality amounts to a continuum of changes that can be traced backwards as a convergence upon what was and forwards as a divergence from the past.  Consequently, whatever importance can or cannot be attached to the nature of ‘things in themselves’, it remains a fact that the difference they make is set within a wider reality.

In every case, we may perceive a fact in terms of its origins in something else – that is, relative to some other fact identifiable as its cause.  But even then we can never see an ‘original cause’ as it is, on its own, since every cause is manifestly incomplete in the absence of an effect.  In turn, effects are seen to make a difference when it becomes apparent that things differ from the way they were – a difference which at first contrasts with the state of ‘the cause’ as it was and afterwards with ‘the effect’ as it furthers a succession of changes.

However, causes do not explain existence.  For instance, we do not find the nature of life in the non-living states of its precursors; and it is only after its appearance that we can begin to look for its causes there.  So we perceive life as a fact that is wrapped up in a continuum of factors which we cannot explain fully in terms of the way things were – because of the essential ingredient of change. Therefore we can neither explain this vital factor retrospectively as an ‘originating cause’ nor in terms of the difference ‘it makes’, which becomes consummate only in the wake of things yet to be.

Mike Laidler

Needing to know

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Green is the colour of nature (photosynthesis) in reflecting the one colour it doesn’t need.

Things seen as causes of consciousness depend on an eventuality that is conspicuously more than those causes.

We know by the fact of knowing as much as of the fact of the facts known.

The fact that an objective world can be separated from our subjective world in an act of knowing owes to the fact of the subject, not the object.

It is a myth that science can explain the bigger picture by subtracting everything from the picture in order to identify an original cause.

Causality is a contextual reality in a context that now includes our line of sight.

The universe is incomplete in all its objective causes and states – which can now be seen as a prelude to the presence of an extensive subjective dimension.

Facts speak to us only insofar as we select them for that purpose.

Science remains a natural philosophy insofar as it doesn’t exist without the need to know – which an objective world doesn’t seem to share with us.

No fact exists on its own, especially a known fact – and the world alone is not enough to account for the fact of knowledge.

Science changes the world through the thinking by which the world became more than it was.

Every perceived fact is a fact made of perception.

It is not the facts that generate a truth or falsity, but our values – our vested interests held in a point of view.

It seems unthinkable that we need to think outside the world that ‘science has given us’ in order to see a world in which science represents but one form of thinking – in which thinking makes science what it is.

We become victims of our own prejudices in judging ourselves by the scientific standards we impose on the world.

Mike Laidler

Philosophy versus science

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There is no contest, not because they are doing different things, but because they are indispensably complimentary when it comes to the big project of trying to understand the essential nature of existence – and it would be naïve in the extreme to say that one can work without the other.

Stereotypically, science explores facts whilst philosophy explores ideas; however, there is no known fact or truth that is independent of its conceptualisation, and the ‘known evidence’ simply reiterates the problem of getting to know – for in order to make progress we need to constantly re-evaluate the evidence, which never was independent of our values. Indeed progress seems to require cohorts of dedicated scientists and philosophers who are passionately involved in their version of ‘the truth’.

Furthermore, values can prejudice our perceptions, including our approach towards knowledge and its ‘value-free’ content – since an understanding is not something to be recognised outside itself, nor does a fact discover its own relevance. But we don’t think of a scientific fact as beholding to its personal relevance for the discoverer, though it is impossible to detach the personal from any aspect of human endeavour. Yet it is assumed that a philosopher’s work can be entirely personal to them and of little or no wider significance until others happen to discover some meaning in it for themselves.

Mike Laidler

What is infinity?

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Perhaps there is more to it than any unbounded extension in the dimensions of matter, space and/or time – for even the galaxies are not necessarily infinite, let alone the timeless tracts of primordial possibility.  And we can also encounter ‘it’ as a diverse property of content and form in number, geometry, language, music, art, literature and thought.         

Then perhaps the indeterminable limits of our concepts hold the key to the ‘redefinition’ of infinity as an infinity of differences, which science now posits, in part, with the theory of a multiverse.

Nonetheless, the concept of infinity presents the mind with a paradox, since the definition of infinity, by definition, defies definition.

Mike Laidler

 

Philosophy Alive

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Philosophy is the idea that carries the present into the future, and it stays alive by being re-cast in the mind that is the future’s future.  But it is the way of language, not philosophy, to further itself in the endless dissection of what has been said.  For no analysis of language has uncovered the real world.  Also, no record of things said lets us know what to say next.  Nor is our recognition of the past masters sufficient to show us what is to come.

Mike Laidler

 

Surviving Death

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Will systematic organ replacement do the job?  Or even a head transplant?  Do we need to remain biological, or could synthetic body parts take over?  Setting aside the ‘hardware’ questions, would it be sufficient to transfer the memory into a suitable receptor – real or artificial?  Ultimately, could we liberate ourselves from our physical encumbrances?  Might this constitute some form of rebirth – or should we accept our lot and patiently await the redemptive intervention of an insuperable supernatural presence?  In any case, is it immoral to cheat death?  Is it not ethically appropriate to strive for self-improvement, both physical and mental and isn’t modern technology a benign means to a desirable end?

But do these scenarios use up all the options?  Are we definable by our embodiments?  If not, by what extra-bodily capacity are we able to recognise the difference?  And isn’t our brand of intentional action something alien to nature?  Also, doesn’t consciousness introduce a real difference that is neither evident in the stark biology nor definable by what we happen to be conscious of?  Likewise, what if there is more to us than a life we can call our own?  Then what if we are more than a personality forged by circumstance – because personal being transcends our individuality and we retain the flexibility to be more than we can become in any number of biological lives?

Mike Laidler

 

Elephants and Feathers

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My left leg and a light bulb don’t equal two of anything even though one plus one surely equals two – except there is always scope for an active imagination to find a connection. Indeed no branch of mathematics is without its imaginative dimension – especially when we take a mathematical equation to stand for an equalisation of differences, so to prove that mathematics not only shows how the universe works, it also shows how it is. However, reality is bigger than our explanations, which is why an active imagination remains an essential requirement for doing science. And it takes an active imagination to say that all things are really one thing because the differences disappear at atomic levels.

Therefore, whilst it is true that an elephant equals a feather because their differences disappear when comparing their behaviour under gravity, nevertheless such convergences in reality have nothing to tell us about the emergent divergences – whereby realities come to differ from one another. Meanwhile, our scientific equations rely on differences that can be equated. Yet even at an elementary level there remains a functional difference between energy and matter, otherwise we would have no basis to start looking for their equivalence. And despite all our proofs there are other phenomenal differences that pertain – because life is an unnecessary divergence within material reality, and consciousness marks a fundamental departure of a different sort, whilst the brain provides only secondary evidence of the existence of a thought.

Mike Laidler

Meaning’s meanderings

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What a wonder of nature is the human kind

What a form of being

How broad in outlook

Though how abject in insight

Yet we deign to take the measure of it all

by the yardstick of our understanding

And explain it – within the limits we bestow

on knowledge set to language.

Mike Laidler

Angry science

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Typically, there is more to a scientific fact than meets the eye and that extra something is the scientific theory.  Of course, all theories begin as speculative and sometimes emotive interpretations of observation.   But no fact becomes ‘a fact of science’ unless it is wrapped up in a theory.  And as it happens, there is nothing more theoretical than our attempts to explain the ‘beginning of the universe’.

Scientists are firstly human beings who relish peer support and it is only natural for them to defend the validity of their ‘pet’ theories by citing the extent of their confirmation.  But theories remain theoretical whilst the principle job of the scientist is, in fact, to seek disconfirmation – though it is not uncommon to see ‘dispassionate scientists’ becoming passionately attached to ‘their’ favoured theories.

For instance, a high-level dispute has recently broken out over the validity of the dominant theory of ‘The Big Bang and inflation’ as the explanation of the beginning of the universe.  Suffice it to say that scientific theories rise to dominance on the back of the amount of support they receive, especially when they are confirmed by observation.  But the observable facts are always open to revision and according to the late Karl Popper, who remains a respected authority on this topic, the weight of evidence is no guarantor of the truth.

In addition, this fracas has all the elements of a classic scientific dispute of the type predicted by the late Thomas Kuhn in his seminal book: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  The proponents of the dominant theory of inflation are acting as though their take on the facts has the status of a ‘paradigm’ – in short, it overrules any facts to the contrary and in so doing stands for an accord that preserves its version of ‘normal science’ as the official view of reality.

But science depends on its revolutionaries – the problem being that it’s all theory at the end of the day; and the speculation remains fallible, especially when the theory is so broad-based in its ambitions as to claim the status of a ‘theory of everything’.

Mike Laidler

Further Reading: Hannah Osborne’s article on 13.5.17: ‘Hawking Pens Angry Letter about How the Universe Began’ https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.techtimes.com/amp/articles/207265/20170515/stephen-hawking-32-other-scientists-pen-furious-letter-about-origin-of-universe-theory.htm

Jumping into rivers

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Myths exist to ‘explain the inexplicable’, and insofar as we believe that existence is potentially explicable we are supporting an epic myth – namely that we can define the greater fact of existence from a lesser perspective that subsists as a part of it.

Ultimately, there is a paradox at the heart of all explanation which leaves us with two strands of logic appertaining to things as they are and are not: observable and unobservable, definitive and indefinite, one thing and another – explicable and inexplicable.

The ancients knew of this as the paradox of change: that it is logically possible to explain why Achilles cannot beat a tortoise in a race, or how an arrow cannot move through the air, or that we cannot step into the same river twice.

As things currently stand, we explain the process of change as a transition from what was to what is, because this is the observable component of the reality.  But the flow of change is not something we can capture analytically.

So it is because we know we exist biologically that we say biology is the cause of our existence, but it doesn’t explain the ‘biological changes’ that place us in the elevated state of being able to observe biology – to wrestle with the fact that biology is and is not explaining itself.

Mike Laidler